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Show HN: CSS Studio. Design by hand, code by agent
Hi HN! I've just released CSS Studio, a design tool that lives on your site, runs on your browser, sends updates to your existing AI agent, which edits any codebase. You can actually play around with the latest version directly on the site.
Technically, the way this works is you view your site in dev mode and start editing it. In your agent, you can run /studio which then polls (or uses Claude Channels) an MCP server. Changes are streamed as JSON via the MCP, along with some viewport and URL information, and the skill has some instructions on how best to implement them.
It contains a lot of the tools you'd expect from a visual editing tool, like text editing, styles and an animation timeline editor.
- ramon156 6mo agoI'll be the boogeyman, how does this compare to Figma's AI Design tool? I've had an easy experience with it, although it's just a GPT wrapper.
- SirHound 6mo agoWith Figma Make, that's essentially doing the same thing as your agent, just with a visual sandbox. i.e building something from scratch. CSS Studio leverages your existing agent - so it assumes you've already done this part. Where this comes in is when you want to design not just using chat (although it does also support chat). Drawing new elements, visual style controls, inline content editing, animation timeline editor and preview. Then once you're done you can send those changes to your agent with a click (or turn on auto-apply) It does have some similarities with Figma's Code Layers in that you can draw a new element on the page, click chat, and tell the agent to generate x inside.
- steve-atx-7600 6mo agoI get a lot out of giving Claude screenshots of a baseline of what I want and describing how my goal design differs from it. Output is a single page apps where that I can use for high fidelity prototypes. Then, I have Claude implement the final version of this iteration into our product single page app repo (following existing patterns we’ve established for long term maintenance). For more throwaway code (maintenance not important, mostly static content), our marketing team is able to do this to create content that they put into webflow.
- evancaine 6mo agoCongrats on the launch. Now put a giant, 30 second video of the product being used, directly below "Design by hand.Code by agent." No one is clicking Get Started or Buy Now until they know what the product is, and a 30 second video is 100x better than any amount of text.
- SirHound 6mo agoI did have a video on for launch but removed it when I added CSS Studio itself to the page (check top right). Perhaps it can make a return though!
- gianthard 6mo agoThe video better be visible on mobile. I read HN on phone.
- SirHound 6mo agoIt's a fair point - deployed
- bossyTeacher 6mo agoYou need a video. Time is money
- SirHound 6mo agoIt's up!
- serial_dev 6mo agoI’m on mobile, I’d much rather see some visual demo, ideally video, explaining your product in 60 seconds or less than try to tap around in the live demo.
- SirHound 6mo agoIt's a great point, I added the video back
- tyleo 6mo agoThe landing page feels tacky to me. It has a similar style to what I’ve seen LLMs churn out across the internet. Unclear if it’s actually generated or not but it’s at least in that style. For a design product, I’d expect it to have more personality. I’d recommend reving the landing by hand. The sense I get is that this tool can make a site that looks like everyone else’s. It would be neat to see something unique.
- SirHound 6mo agoI suspect its the color scheme? I wanted something to contrast with but pair with https://motion.dev https://motion.dev but I know AIs pump out a lot of purple. I'm mostly a developer though so my design skills are a little rusty still!
- BloondAndDoom 6mo agoMotion page looks much better, but other than purple I’d focus on design more, even to suggest hire a designer on project basis, let them make a stunning landing page. If you are selling a design tool (arguably CSS is somewhere in between) then you have to show your mastery of the domain. —assuming you are serious and it’s not a weekend project
- duskdozer 6mo agoA big smell and my biggest pet peeve with them is the excessive, custom javascript animations that don't respect my settings to disable animations and which break through my own extra defenses, all tucked away in some webpack chunk I'd have to debug to get rid of. As soon as I see above-the-fold text fade and slide in I close the tab to spare my head, stomach, and CPU.
- BloondAndDoom 6mo agoThis was my biggest take, when I see someone selling a design tool that’s looks very much like designed by LLM, that’s a red flag. I got the exact same vibe, no idea whether it was a prompt or a detailed design, but right now it looks like output of a prompt and not hand crafted. Given the whole idea is selling a design tool that’s looks very gives user a sense of they can control details, this page doesn’t deliver that at all. I’d focus on the design, because that’s the biggest demo of your product maybe even bigger than the demo. Imagine a unique website that users looks and feel like I wish this was my website. A rare instance visual design actually matters for a startup :)
- latexr 6mo ago64.23€ and 256.92€ are strange numbers. The latter looks like bad math, since the text suggests it’s 51*5, which would be 255. Of course you can charge whatever you like, but I’m curious as to the reasoning behind those specific numbers.
- rafaelmn 6mo agoDoes this work with CSS in JS stuff and CSS frameworks - like if I was using Chakra would this be able to edit the site elements and have the agent reverse map to where the style attributes need to go ?
- SirHound 6mo agoYes - if your agent can edit your codebase it will put the changes in the right place.
- dmje 6mo agoI'm definitely the audience for this - and +1 to the "show video of it in action" comments...
- mpeg 6mo agoMotion is an excellent library so I gave this a go on a prod site. Some feedback - I LOVE the concept, no clunky SaaS, you add the package and start it on your dev server and it just works. It seamlessly did with my vite based build. - Needs a diff view which tells me what the agent is going to change when I publish my changes, right now it's a bit scary to use without it (not sure if it does once you try to publish changes, I didn't get that far in the process) - I don't see the point of the "draw" feature. Maybe it's because I envision this kind of tool being used so that non-technical members of the team can make small design changes without dev support, and not as a way to design from scratch, but maybe you have a use-case for it. - Integration with tailwindcss would be a killer feature, this particular project uses tailwind so all the styles in the style view show as the default ones but of course they're being applied via classes. You could detect tailwind classes and either show them separately or resolve them and show what they do in the styles view, then on publish you'd tell the agent to edit using tailwind classes I agree with what others have said, a video or even better a live demo would be great. A demo would be extra work but would be super cool, as a stopgap you could have a stackblitz demo maybe. The client-side injected js -> mcp flow is brilliant though. I might have to steal that idea for some projects I'm working in, I can imagine a lot of scenarios where it would make a great interface
- SirHound 6mo agoThanks for your feedback! I just pushed a video to the homepage, there was already a live demo though, it was actually quite simple to implement (mostly gate a few things). There was a bit of a fear that agent somewhere out there would still be listening though... I think a diff is an excellent idea. Perhaps with the ability to remove specific changes and switch before/after. In terms of Tailwind, I'm thinking about a token/strict mode which would detect Tailwind classes and CSS variables. It wouldn't expose these in the sense you had to apply each one manually, but if you were for instance changing padding, it would snap between all your pre-defined tokens. For the draw feature I think I'm just heavily Framer-pilled and it lets you pre-determine a rough width and height within a stack. But perhaps there's space for a click-to-add also with minimum dimensions.
- 6mo ago
- megaman821 6mo agoI was looking at this yesterday and wondering if it would play nice with design systems. AI loves making localized changes and when playing around with spacing I tend to just bump up and down values until they look close, so when this sends over the changeset, what are the chances the spacing token is going to be used rather than some exact pixel value?
- SirHound 6mo agoYou can apply the token directly but of course this isn't as nice as freeform editing. I suspect the pixel value would be used because the intention probably isn't to change the root variable (as there's an explicit option for that). I'm thinking of making a token mode where we limit you to the values of available CSS variables or Tailwind classes (perhaps unless you hold shift or something)
- bigblind 6mo agoThis looks interesting! I understand not wanting to put out a narrated tour as the video, but being visually impaired, i find video demos without narration, that constantly move around/focus on different things hard to follow. It still might be worth putting a short screencast with you actually walkign through usijng the product and narrating it.
- SirHound 6mo agoThat's a great idea, I'll look into doing a more long form demonstration
- hirako2000 6mo agoI find AI unable to do CSS. Perhaps because it's cascading. Sure AI can do styling though.
- nc1zdev 6mo agoawesome, can imagine it's a game-changer in frontend dev agentic development
- codetiger 6mo agoUnlike other comments, for me the experience on the product marketing worked well and straight forward. After reading the title and landing on your homepage, I had the feeling that this is yet another product claiming WYSIWYG like editor for the web claims on making CSS editing easier. And yes the product achieves same as I thought. Video confirmed it, and homepage live demo confirmed it again. Surprisingly the claim feels true, this time. It feels natural and UX feels great.
- SirHound 6mo agoGlad you enjoyed it! Thanks for the feedback. In fairness some of the the things like a video on the homepage are there as a response from initial comments in this thread.
- Manchitsanan 6mo ago[dead]
- volume_tech 6mo ago[dead]
- crepuscularJ 6mo agoI work in an agency that makes flashy marketing sites. My biggest concern with tools like this is always how it works responsively across viewports. I can make a change in dev tools and it can translate to my code, but it might not work at all when I drag the viewport up and down. Can you comment on how this product works on that problem?
- SirHound 6mo agoIf you make the page small and then make some changes, it knows you're doing so in a small breakpoint. So if you have mobile-specific styles and you edit some - these are going to remain mobile specific. I am working (right this second) on a canvas mode where you can see breakpoints side by side which will make this a bit easier than physically making your screen small.
- tipiirai 6mo agoThis launch feels weird. Every blog post is dated Nov 25, 2025 (~6 months ago), and no events since. What's up?
- SirHound 6mo agoWhat blog posts?
- TehCorwiz 6mo agoThere's a 'Blog' link in the footer.
- SirHound 6mo agoOh. Hmm. I suppose I shouldn't deeplink into the Motion website. I can see why this is confusing. Also, re the dates. Looks to be a Framer bug that I will contact them about. Thanks.
- tipiirai 6mo agoThe ones linked on the front page footer
- SirHound 6mo agoFixed the dates, and actually removed the Motion deeplink as I can see it was confusing. Thanks
- dgb23 6mo agoWhen I apply display:none, how would I get back the element without using the browser console? If I change things from the console, does your tool watch the changes via mutation observer or does it only know about the changes from the visual tool itself?
- SirHound 6mo agoIt only knows about changes from the tool. I started this project by attempting to listen to changes from DevTools via a Mutation Observer but it was extremely noisy on many sites. I haven't added display and visibility yet, it's on the list, but you would simply toggle them back. There is an element selector sidebar so they're not going anywhere.
- Vachyas 6mo agoThe video was really good, and the UI looks fun too. If I understand correctly, is this not as useful for frameworkless html/css/js development? Since when you make edits using browser-built-in-devtools it can and does modify the actual css files (in-memory, of course) which you can use to copy-replace with entirely (assuming no build/bundling step aswell). If so and this allows you to use any framework and still have that kind of workflow, that's fantastic. Half the reason I don't like using frameworks is because I lose the built-in WYSIWYG editor functionality. Guess I'd still lose the usefulness of the built-in js debugger, tho :(
- SirHound 6mo agoYeah I mean you can basically achieve this set up even with frameworks, if you're using stylesheets, but it's the copy/pasting and finding source code that is usually the pain. With this you just press apply (or enable auto-apply) and your agent gets to work. You can also edit the content, add/remove/reorder elements etc, I don't know how good the browser dev tools are at writing all that back though.
- Vachyas 6mo agoWhen you said Agent and AI, I thought there would be some way for us to resize or move elements, and have the agent figure out the right properties to change (whether it's margin, padding, top, left, and on the wrapper or whatever) ideally in a way that's cleanest WRT surrounding/existing CSS. But I can see the more deterministic nature of the current offering being a plus too since there's no worry about the agent doing things you didn't "approve" or in the "wrong way"
- thrownaway561 6mo ago"Hi HN! I've just released CSS Studio, a design tool that lives on your site, runs on your browser, sends updates to your existing AI agent, which edits any codebase. You can actually play around with the latest version directly on the site." I didn't see anything like that in the video you posted on the homepage. Personally I found the video VERY confusing on what exactly the benefit of the product is and actually how to use it. The music also was annoying and made it hard to focus on the actual video. You might want to redo it and concentrate on explaining exactly what the benefits of your product are over the 50+ other products just like this one.
- ihycjnigghjljb 6mo agoLook, if you’re making a design tool, the absolute very least that you can do to show that you know what makes a design tool good is design a good website for it. LLMs already carry (rightfully, I might add) a “laziness” aspect to them. You’re doing yourself and your work a major disservice by making this website not only generic as hell, but inconsistent and downright broken on mobile as well.
- zghst 6mo ago$99 dollars vs using Cursor/Windsurf?!
- SirHound 6mo agoIt works with Cursor and Windsurf not without them
- anonymous344 6mo agowysiwyg and wordpress gui editors: set width/height of an element by pixels. Me: no thank you, i need col-sm-12 and col-md-6 like in bootstrap... actually i use bootstrap 90% of my projects
- ape4 6mo agoI imagine it would be harder to make a design product that doesn't use pixels but it needs to be done - because that's the right way to make CSS
- 65 6mo agoAny website that isn't some landing page or basic blog is going to need human intervention in the code (craftsmanship, essentially). And any website that's a landing page or basic blog already has a million tools for GUI design. I would be surprised if this takes off as site builders are already an incredibly crowded space.
- butterlettuce 6mo agoI see a website in purple colors selling something, I buy
- agomezc01 6mo ago[flagged]
- lapinovski 6mo agoyou should definitely highlight the edit button on the right corner. until I've noticed it, I was quite skeptical. after playing around - I'm immediately sold (i'm on desktop btw) congrats on launch, nice product. Hope this would be a thing.
- SirHound 6mo agoThanks! Redesign incoming based on the comments here so hopefully everything is clearer soon
- zephyrwhimsy 6mo ago[dead]
- zephyrwhimsy 6mo ago[dead]
- mollygarden 6mo ago[flagged]
- unvalley 6mo agoI like this concept and it definitely fits current AI era. There’s still a lot of room for humans to clean up the kind of sloppy, AI-ish design that tools tend to spit out today. I’m sure that will keep improving, but for now you still need a human hand on it. I get that this tool is aimed at designers, but depending on how the features evolve I think it could pull in a lot more indie devs and similar folks too.
- Polarity 6mo agogood idea. will vibe code a free alternative this weekend.
- Yabood 6mo agoCome back on Monday with a link.
- seattle_spring 6mo agoCan't tell if this is a joke comment, or a "why does FB have thousands of engineers, I could code it in a weekend!"-style comment, modernized for the era of AI.
- supliminal 6mo agoDid HN not prohibit/restrict A.I.-driven Show HN entries?
- Terretta 6mo agoThis doesn't feel like the same category. The product itself is augmented human: specific concrete human design choices and changes, using the machine to toil. It's not "I will black magic this for you, blow you away on a one shot, and utterly fail to be useful in real life". It's more "you do the you part, machine types up the diffs." Philosophically, I both believe in this approach, and, find it goes much further in the real world, as if mastery matters over median-ocrity. The submission itself here is clearly not the product submission template explosion on reddit and here in the OpenClaw boom. The product concept and use feel human designed as well, although the site selling it is clearly template or design gen.
- itsevrgrn 6mo agoA bunch of comments are complaining about how it's crazy that this is $99 or that they'll vibe code a free version this weekened. I've tried to make a similar tool for myself that let's me change CSS values live without talking to the agent and it made me appreciate the hundreds of invisible details that figma, framer, paper, etc. get right when building a visual canvas editor. I spent 6 hours going back and forth with claude just to get the editor to feel somewhat usable for editing existing front end work.
- my_throwaway23 6mo agoWYSIWYG, huh? I'm certainly not against the idea, and the editor seems to work well enough (given the 3 minutes I spent on the landing page). I'm not so sure why it needs an LLM in-between the source files and the editor though...
- alexbuilder 6mo ago[flagged]
- alexbuilder 6mo ago[flagged]
- naet 6mo agoI'm confused about what the AI is doing, since it seems like a WSYWIG site editor. The AI is just to apply the changes? Why not have the WSYWIG just apply it directly if that is how you build the site?
- SirHound 6mo agoWorks on any stack
- toastal 6mo agoThere is no <noscript> so I can even look at what this is.
- purple-leafy 6mo agoHey OP I had this same idea a few years ago, but my implementation was dogshit! Check out the browser extension I made [0] - note it doesn’t work anymore, it worked with the first released Google Gemini Flash model ;) Check out my browser extension, it may give you some more ideas?? My extension is from 2024 But basically it would let you screenshot a portion of your dev site, and auto get feedback from an LLM to improve the visuals. My original idea was to have it modify your source code, but I lost interest in the project lol Good luck with launch [0] - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/design-copilot/hgaldpfdgmmojgdlaiapgndeicgdbldp https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/design-copilot/hgal...
- thekevan 6mo agoTerrible music on the video that didn't even show me anything about the product they want $99 for. Instant bounce.
- japaco 6mo agoCongrats on the launch. The video helps and the demo is pretty dialed in. Nice job.
- kylex-ken 6mo agoI'll give my honest take, I think what you've done is taken dev-tools and given it a wrapper that most designers (including myself would love) I find myself in dev tools alot during QA refining the design, since rendering is never exact. And you've added MCP server integration which is great. But.... First 99$? that's steep my full seat of Figma is 160.0$, so I don't see the value. I do see the value in convienience so you may want to rethink the pricing structure. Second. It's a design tool, not SASS software, the website should speak to designers like me, not look like supabase. Great job, I wish you luck...ken. Kylex.io
- l2s0 6mo ago[dead]
- Shinobis_dev 6mo ago[dead]
- midnightn 6mo agoRunning three agents(gpt, gemini, claude) in production for a different domain — curious which model handles the /studio skill best in your experience?
- SirHound 6mo agoHaiku is fastest and also quite good at this! Because the edits are quite accurate in terms of its this element with this value
- vaibhavsing 6mo agoawesome
- mvsingh 6mo agoIs the website vibe coded? the format seems claude coded. All the best on the launch.
- zephyrwhimsy 6mo ago[dead]